'\"
'\" Copyright (c) 1998 by Scriptics Corporation.
'\" 
'\" See the file "license.terms" for information on usage and redistribution
'\" of this file, and for a DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES.
'\" 
'\" RCS: @(#) $Id: encoding.n 144 2003-02-05 10:56:26Z mdejong $
'\" 
.so man.macros
.TH encoding n "8.1" Tcl "Tcl Built-In Commands"
.BS
.SH NAME
encoding \- Manipulate encodings
.SH SYNOPSIS
\fBencoding \fIoption\fR ?\fIarg arg ...\fR?
.BE

.SH INTRODUCTION
.PP
Strings in Tcl are encoded using 16-bit Unicode characters.  Different
operating system interfaces or applications may generate strings in
other encodings such as Shift-JIS.  The \fBencoding\fR command helps
to bridge the gap between Unicode and these other formats.

.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
Performs one of several encoding related operations, depending on
\fIoption\fR.  The legal \fIoption\fRs are:
.TP
\fBencoding convertfrom ?\fIencoding\fR? \fIdata\fR
Convert \fIdata\fR to Unicode from the specified \fIencoding\fR.  The
characters in \fIdata\fR are treated as binary data where the lower
8-bits of each character is taken as a single byte.  The resulting
sequence of bytes is treated as a string in the specified
\fIencoding\fR.  If \fIencoding\fR is not specified, the current
system encoding is used.
.TP
\fBencoding convertto ?\fIencoding\fR? \fIstring\fR
Convert \fIstring\fR from Unicode to the specified \fIencoding\fR.
The result is a sequence of bytes that represents the converted
string.  Each byte is stored in the lower 8-bits of a Unicode
character.  If \fIencoding\fR is not specified, the current
system encoding is used.
.TP
\fBencoding names\fR
Returns a list containing the names of all of the encodings that are
currently available. 
.TP
\fBencoding system\fR ?\fIencoding\fR?
Set the system encoding to \fIencoding\fR. If \fIencoding\fR is
omitted then the command returns the current system encoding.  The
system encoding is used whenever Tcl passes strings to system calls.

.SH EXAMPLE
.PP
It is common practice to write script files using a text editor that
produces output in the euc-jp encoding, which represents the ASCII
characters as singe bytes and Japanese characters as two bytes.  This
makes it easy to embed literal strings that correspond to non-ASCII
characters by simply typing the strings in place in the script.
However, because the \fBsource\fR command always reads files using the
ISO8859-1 encoding, Tcl will treat each byte in the file as a separate
character that maps to the 00 page in Unicode.  The
resulting Tcl strings will not contain the expected Japanese
characters.  Instead, they will contain a sequence of Latin-1
characters that correspond to the bytes of the original string.  The
\fBencoding\fR command can be used to convert this string to the
expected Japanese Unicode characters.  For example,
.CS
	set s [encoding convertfrom euc-jp "\\xA4\\xCF"]
.CE
would return the Unicode string "\\u306F", which is the Hiragana
letter HA.

.SH "SEE ALSO"
Tcl_GetEncoding

.SH KEYWORDS
encoding
